Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.
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I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.
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Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
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The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
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I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.
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We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do!
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Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.
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To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.
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Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
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Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
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I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
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To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.
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Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.
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The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.
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There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
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Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
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The renewed use of lobotomy today is particularly applicable to women: Because they do routine things, it is possible to take away their spirit of revolt, of debate, of criticism, and still leave them perfectly capable of making stews or washing dishes. It's terrible, this tendency to consider women something dangerous to society.
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There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.
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Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
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Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
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To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.
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The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.
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They Americans want to believe that Good and Evil can be defined in precise categories, that Good is already, or will be easily achieved. ... if this optimism appears too superficial, they will try to create a kind of anti-God: the U.S.S.R. That is Evil, and it only needs to be annihilated to re-establish the reign of Good.
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The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.